Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Laughter in the Gallery. The response in the U.N. hall to Khrushchev's oratorical whopper was stunned silence, broken once or twice by incredulous laughter from the press gallery. And this came close to summarizing unspoken official reaction throughout the West. For diplomatic reasons, no one wanted to come right out and say "nonsense," but the fact remained that Nikita's demand for total disarmament was so absurd and impractical as to be insulting. It paid no more than token heed to the all-important Western insistence that any disarmament agreement is meaningless and dangerous without an ironclad...
...withdrawal," one doctor said that Podola "liked to keep near the wall when he moved along the corridor." "It is an accepted thing that distinguished scholars like to walk near the wall," observed Mr. Justice Davies. "Dr. Johnson did it all his life," volunteered Counsel Lawton amid laughter, "going along touching doorposts down Fleet Street...
...sandwiches soggy); there is Hart's law for the aspiring director (the less sure he is of himself, the tougher he must be with the cast). Hart knows how to interpret all the sounds made by an audience: the implications of their coughs, the degrees of their laughter, the intensity of their applause-and he also knows that "there is never again the sound of trumpets like the sound of the New York opening-night audience giving a play its unreserved approval." After all the agonies of the road, that is what happened with Once in a Lifetime...
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid us?...Thus they yelled and laughed. Then the madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances...
...Hellenic Greek of the New. The idea of God as an ineffable opaque Presence, as the principle of causality, or as "the Ground of Being" and "Being-in-Itself" would surely have sent Abraham and Moses, Mary and the Magdalene, Saints Peter and Paul, into gales of reverent laughter; such a rarified and remote ontological abstraction or inarticulate mood of awe would seem an uncomprehending parody of the inexhaustibly rich and concrete Personality whose love and rage and will they each had known with such shattering intimacy. If it is, however, one of the former concepts that is being generally...